Picture puzzles, games, and simple activities introduce the mathematical concepts of abstract thinking, circuitry, geometry, and topology.
Book Description
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
17 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Good intentions, poorly done,
By
This review is from: Anno's Math Games 3 (No 3) (Paperback)
About me: I helped edit Arthur Engel's Exploring Mathematics With Your Computer and other math books.I looked forward to seeing a book presenting to the very young simple math ideas which are outside the school curriculum. I leave it to librarians and teachers to say how children react to this book; what I wish to point out are two instances where the mathematical knowledge conveyed by the author, not to mention of the editors and translators, is below par. On p. 16-17 we see perspective views of two walls of a house which have on them pictures whose true shapes are squares. One needs no expertise to see that something about these views is wrong. The laws of perspective enable one to say what it is. If you hold a camera straight and take a picture of a vertical square on a wall, the images of the horizontal sides can not be longer than the longer vertical side image. In the book they are much longer! A written discussion of pespective is in fact too difficult for early elementary grades. The proper way to discuss images with young children is by producing images of objects with a camera obscura, a box with a pinhole or lens in the middle of one side and frosted glass on the other. The LCD screen of a digital camera could also be used, except that it is too small and delicate. ------------ A later section of the book is devoted to the following kind of puzzle. Can we walk in one stretch along every block of every street of a village exactly once? Leonhard Euler pointed out, first, that this is impossible if there are more than 2 junctions where an odd number of streets come together, and second, that it is otherwise possible. The first statement can be derived in a way which even a third grader can understand. Every time we pass through a junction, two more of the blocks which meet at the junction become traversed. Thus, at a junction other than where we start or end our walk, we can finish off all the blocks only if the number meeting at the junction is even. The author devotes a number of pages to this puzzle but misses the opportunity to present Euler's simple but ingenious argument. Worse than that, he misquotes Euler by saying the walk is impossible if there are more than 3 odd junctions. This is true but does not imply that the walk is impossible on Euler's original example, the figure on the left of p. 66, which has 3 odd junctions.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
So You'd Like to...
|
|
